I don’t write to be famous, I don’t write to be known, I write because I am and I want to be read. How sad to fill a room with paintings no one sees or play music no one hears. Writing is talking without sound, singing without score and dancing without movement and yet, it is all of them. It is a solitary art conjured from thought and expressed by the need to communicate.

HEAD SLAPS, SPEED BUMPS and LIGHTBULBS, one woman's WTF, oops and ah-ha moments of life.

They were published once, and as every writer knows, once is not enough.

Sunday, July 17, 2016

If
a picture is worth a thousand words, or ten-thousand, depending on the quote, I
just threw away millions and millions of words.

In
the last twelve years, (the time we have lived in this house), I have lost both
my parents, my mother-in-law, a very dear friend and my brother. And five years
prior I had to help my mom and dad deal with the flotsam and jetsam life remnants
of my dad’s two brothers and his mom, my adored Nana. After cleaning out the
houses of those who have passed on I learned...

once you die most everything you own ends up in the trash or in someone
else’s yard sale.

It’s
not a bad thing, that what you loved and enjoyed is considered near worthless
to your children or friends. But it is kind of sad that the people you love most
have to cull through your leftovers. That’s why, as we continue the sorting and
packing until we move in a couple of weeks, we’re filling a dumpster with what once
seemed so important to have and save. A lot of what we have accumulated, because
of age, condition and gluttony, means little to us now and nothing to our kids.
Pitching the old out a window into a dumpster is not only freeing but
empowering.

This
morning I sealed and labeled six file boxes of photos. On the way to donating
dishes to Goodwill, I told my husband that saving those old pictures, (the ones
worth thousands of words each), was stupid. I promised that when we got home I
would unseal the boxes and shed some nameless photographic history.

I remember going
through my parents’ stuff and taking home the photos they had saved from my
childhood, their childhood and the few very old more formal pictures of their
parents as children. But, it seemed ridiculous to save photos of people I do
not know. Some boxes were of an aunt and uncle whose circle of friends was
totally unknown to me and others were of people I have only known when I flipped
through the boxes after someone died and the life libraries had to be moved. So
in the dumpster many went as I reduced the load to two small plastic bins. One bin
is half full with current pics of my daughters as kids and one is packed with
my childhood and the faces of people I can actually recall.

It’s okay for my
kids to pitch the old ones when I die.

If they were to glance
at the grainy black and white picture of a backyard filled with people, a badminton
net and tables filled with food, it will mean nothing to them.But today the picture spoke to me, grabbed
ahold of my mind and gently yanked me back over sixty years to the day the
family gathered in our back yard, as storms approached. Some made it to the
house before it began to thunder and pour, but many of us young ones dove under
the tables for shelter. My kids will never know how we huddled under the tables
while it stormed, laughing and reaching up and out and over the edge, to save
the food and eat while we sat in the mud beneath the oilcloth covered tables. That picture I saved for two reasons: it
helped me remember an absolutely wonderful fun day, and as long as I know the
picture is somewhere in my house, the memory is alive and so am I.

The other pictures
I tossed are at rest now, their conversations and explanations silent because
no one is alive to remember them. As I looked at the pictures of unfamiliar faces,
the images said nothing, I let them go so my children will not have to.

But, how mindful
it was for someone to click a shutter and freeze in time an essay about a
moment in someone’s life even if there is no one left to read it.

Our lives are digitally
cataloged to the extreme now. No bins filling a corner of an attic, no shoe
boxes on a closet shelf filled with birthday snapshots. Thousands of images are
perfectly saved in a cloud somewhere.

My granddaughters
will most likely view their childhoods on a screen rather than a piece of paper
with edges curled from age and attic heat. And I hope that when they are my age
and take the time to look back, they will remember the words I speak to them
through my smile on the screen while holding or playing with them. And yet I
know, someday, someone will be swiping a science fiction type device, my image
will appear and I will be deleted because no one is left alive who remembers
me. And that’s okay because right now, I remember me, my cousins, and sitting in
the mud under a picnic table while the sky roared.

Monday, July 4, 2016

Today was office day, or rather, “…I
wrote this crap day?” Actually it was, “…this is so brilliant why am I not a famous
writer day?”

I just emerged from six hours of
pouring over old manuscripts. Some were in such infancy I am puzzled as to
why I saved them. Others are so full and robust, it’s a wonder I’m not
doing this full time with a hearty bank account and my picture on the cover of
WRITER’S DIGEST.

Again I discovered my mother’s
book, and a journal she kept until a few weeks before she died. Skimming her
entries, I sought the happy ones about my daughters and skipped the doldrum-ones
about getting old and being alone.

I’m also doing something I
thought I’d never do, I’m throwing books away. They are books about writing
which are so archaic in their directives, no one wants them. I mean really, do I
want to save a book which outlines the whole over the transom SASE thing and then
tells me to call the agent if I don’t get a reply in the mail within two weeks.

It kills me to toss a book, even
the paperbacks with flaky yellowed pages that smell of musty neglect because no
one has opened and flipped through so they can breathe a little reader's breath.

It will be a mighty task to move
the books I am keeping and set my office up again. But, to get back to what I love
most, my own crappy brilliance, is what I am really looking forward to. Who needs dishes in the cabinets and sheets on the bed? Writing is what it's all about.

Have you ever thrown books away? And if you did, how did it make you feel?

Times Two

My column 'Enough Said' is in 8 ‘Times’ newspapers, a division of The Day in New London, Connecticut. I weekly pitch myself as the writing love-child of Andy Rooney and Erma Bombeck. Not as acerbic as Andy and a bit more modern than Erma, I admire them as winking-paragons of realistic observation. Enoughsaidcolumn.blogspot.com is my tilt on things. Carolynnwith2Ns is my tilt on everything else. Email me at Cpianta@comcast.net
or CP.enoughsaid@aol.com